Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852 - 1913) produced an estimated 20,000 images as
chief illustrator for the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo in Mexico City. His
prints appeared in many journals and on thousands of broadsides, and are
recognized even today. He illustrated thousands of songs, news events, stories,
legends, games, love letters, school books, card games, and commercial
advertisements. Posada satirized and glorified people of all classes in his
work; his most popular images are the calaveras, or satirical skeletons
produced for the Day of the Dead, celebrated in Mexico on November 2.

The Mexican corrido, or popular ballad, was one of the forms by which
Posada's work was circulated. Distributed as hojas volantes, or
"flying leaves," Posada's prints accompanied the rhymed verse of the
corrido, illustrating a current event such as a revolutionary's farewell, the
capture of a bandit, the death of a bullfighter, the introduction of the
bicycle, or a train wreck. Posada's broadsides were distributed by corridistas,
or musicians who travelled from one market to another, singing the corridos and
selling the cheaply printed copies of the lyrics illustrated by Posada's
engravings.

During the Mexican Revolution, the corrido represented the heartbeat
of the Mexican community. Histories of the revolution were written, in a sense,
in the forms of these traditional songs. In one way or another, many of the corridos
still sung in Mexico today relate to the revolution. Posada's death in 1913 came
toward the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. However, plates that he had made
were used by his publisher years after his death to illustrate new corridos.

The broadsides in the forms of corridos were a method of distribution
which allowed Posada's work to reach a variety of people in Mexico. As Posada's
images, the text, and the music combine, these parts interrelate to form a
language understood by Mexicans of all classes. The corrido served as an
"audio-visual" method of communication; people heard the music while
looking at the art and lyrics of the broadsides. Not only did text, image, and
music rely upon each other in the corridos; the artist, writer, printer,
and musician also were intrinsically related.